Menu status.

Update: Finally got sound recorded, so changed the video clip. Decided to only show the 3D engine this time.

My "proof-of-concept" of a responsive menu system is coming along nicely. The video shows me playing around first with the main screen that uses the 3D engine and then goes to the sub screen, using sprites in the 2D engine.

The background for this little test is that i tried the PSP and really liked the menu system (XrossMediaBar). It was fast, responsive and felt accurate. I wanted to see if I could implement something similar on the DS, and at the same time figure out what factors give good feedback to the user (i.e. gives the feeling of "responsiveness"). A high framerate is of course important, but I suspect that the 60 fps I have right now is actually overkill. Just as important are the "'tween" frames, the frames showing the transitions between icon positions, and the sound. Sorry there is no sound in the video capture, but I haven't been able to capture the sound yet.

The only reason I'm programming this is to get more familiar with programming the DS and also to implement a mock up of a responsive menu system. I'm definitely not going to implement a full menu system like the PSP XMB.

Some technical info about capturing the video: I'm using Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty, running my program through no$gba 2.5c freeware version using wine 0.9.41. I'm capturing the video using recordmydesktop 0.3.1 with the following command line:

recordmydesktop -windowid 0x3a00002 -x 6 -width 256 -height 192 -y 228 -fps 30

(You can easily find the windowid of no$gba using xwininfo).

The icons are courtesy of Th3 ProphetMan.